Live Blogging the Team Building Day - 9.45am

Distilled team building day (also known as “needs to be PPCeen to be believed” - blame Lucy) is officially underway. We’ve all been in since silly-o-clock (7.30am) and breakfast has been had. If you’re following along at home check out our photos on flickr

Back to the task in hand, however, we have decided on which tools we’re building. They are as follows. Drum roll please:

##404 Checker

This tool is first on the list because it’s the easiest to build. The premise is very simple, the tool simply runs over your account, finds a record of all the landing pages you’re using and checks the status code of those pages, checking for 404 error pages. Why is this important? Well if you’re sending traffic to a 404 page you’re throwing money down the drain! One client account we took over management of recently had spent £5,000 driving traffic to a 404 page....... It’s not big, it’s not clever and it costs you money. Our tool will mean you never do it again! Ciaran, no more worrying about those stubby fingers when writing URLs ;-)

##Ad Strength Tool

This is the tool I’m most excited about and I think will provide the most value initially. It’s certainly the one I think we’ll use the most internally. This tool compares the performance of all the adverts in an ad group and tells you which are performing better. But not just regular ‘better’, statistically significant better. Oooooh - fancy :-)

Did I mention this tool will run in the background and notify you automatically as soon as statistical significance is reached? Kick-ass!

##PPC Pricing Guide

What does this tool do? It makes shiny pretty graphs. Everyone loves pretty graphs! Graphs of what you ask? Well Google will already tell you estimated clicks compared with your bid but it’s a pain to query their tool for all bids so our tool will do that hard work for you and drop the results into a pretty graph. Doesn’t make sense? Don’t worry - it does pretty graphs.

We’ve split up into various teams and we’re hard at work on the different aspects of the tools, designing pages, writing copy, taking photos, wearing silly hats etc etc. Of course the real work is being done by Andy and Duncan who are coding the tools. Mush, mush!